Gone
by Badgergater
Summary: Zoe is left wondering


Gone

By Badgergater

Person Of Interest- Between Seasons 3-4

Characters: Zoe Morgan, John Reese

Friendship (non-explicit reference to friends with benefits)

Summary: Zoe is left wondering

Author's Note: Thanks to Corine, for the gift of POI; Wuchel1 for the feedback and referral, and Scully1138 for the beta.

Zoe Morgan didn't worry, not at first. Not for weeks, actually.

That was the kind of…odd…intermittent relationship they had, between her job and his.

No commitments. No entanglements. No questions. No patterns. No promises.

Just - to be honest - good times between two unattached, attractive, libidinous adults. Whenever the spirit moved them.

John would just show up. Sometimes she wondered if he stalked her, in that secret agent way of his.

For a man so tall, so charismatic and so eye-catchingly handsome, it was astonishing the way he could be so inconspicuous. At some moment he would just appear there in the background - lounging like a lazy cat - standing across the street, or stepping up behind her in a store, or sliding into a the seat next to her at a bar, materializing as if out of nowhere.

Looks would be exchanged.

He'd pick a place for them to meet, always a different one.

She knew he was shielding her from his life. They never talked about it of course, though she had a pretty good idea of the sort of work that he and Harold did. What she and John did was flirt, tease, practice their double entendres, play poker, make love. Together they could relax in a way that was all too rare in either of their lives.

He made her laugh; she made him smile.

Sometimes his phone would ring and as suddenly as he had appeared, he would disappear again.

Always before morning he would be gone - never an uncomfortable parting, never an awkward goodbye.

She couldn't say when it was that she had come to the realization that there was something wrong. Just that one day it struck her that she hadn't heard from him or of him in an unusually long time.

It was after the bombing that had killed so many people, leaving the city tense and uneasy in a way it hadn't been since 9/11. She'd thought of John - of Harold and Shaw too actually - when she'd heard of the tragedy, but she had no evidence of possible involvement by any of them. There had been no mention of them, nor anyone like them, on the news. But so many people had gone silent, gone underground, become fleeting shadows - even as she herself had to some extent. Tension reverberated through the city. Caution had seemed to be eminently advisable amid the chaos.

The bombing though- that was the kind of thing she would have expected the three of them to have prevented.

And they hadn't.

Zoe supposed that little tickle of worry in the back of her brain had taken root with that realization. Gradually it had intensified until the tickle evolved into a full blown itch.

She did have a phone number for John, one that he'd given her once long ago, and she had known without his saying it that it was for an emergency only. Her emergency - not his - of course.

After a few silent weeks she'd wanted to - had even started to - dial it once, then wisely thought the better of it.

If he was in trouble, calling that number wouldn't help either one of them. She couldn't help him - his kind of trouble wasn't the kind she could fix. Contacting him could only make things worse, for him and for her. If John had gone off the grid it was with good reason, and he didn't need her mixing in.

Patience, Zoe, she advised herself.

She knew that staying out of his business was the right thing to do, the best thing for both of them, but it wasn't easy.

Still, she trusted that John knew what he was doing. He was far more capable of taking care of himself than anyone she had ever met.

And Harold had John's back. Always.

But she also knew they weren't invincible. She'd seen John's scars, the visible ones and the far more damaging invisible ones. He was a dark and dangerous man, and she knew herself well enough to understand that was part of his appeal. Frightening and reassuring at the same time, John Reese was a walking, talking conundrum - a man who took grave risks, immersed himself in dangerous work, fed on his innate need to protect people and thrived on the danger of it. Yet she had seen his genuine compassion for those who would be deemed by many as unimportant or irrelevant. She had no illusions about the violence he was capable of - in stark contrast to his gentlemanly treatment of her and his ability to be suave and charming and blend in with the swankiest crowd. Yes, a chameleon was what he was.

Underneath that calm exterior lurked a lethal, seething tiger.

Maybe, Zoe told herself, maybe John was just on a longer term job than the usual. It wouldn't be the first time he'd dropped off the radar for days or even weeks.

There had been the time when he'd been tailing that woman psychiatrist, Caroline Turing, and had enlisted her help. He'd disappeared shortly after she'd met with him - gone without a word or a sign, disappeared underground or gone on a job, she didn't know which. And when he had returned he was as taciturn as ever about his business.

Or the time not long after the death of Detective Carter, when once again there was no word about him, no talk among her many and varied contacts. Then one night John had shown up at her apartment looking gaunt, pale, haunted - and bearing fresh, raw scars. He'd been silent, making love to her fiercely, almost angrily, definitely desperately. And then she hadn't heard from him again for quite a while. He'd looked better when he finally did resurface - like he'd come to some sort of acceptance of what had happened - though he never talked about it. Or mentioned Carter's name, ever.

Hell, maybe this time John was on vacation; the man surely needed one, though she honestly couldn't picture him relaxing. She almost laughed out loud at the image that brought to mind, of him prowling around some holiday resort like a lion on the hunt.

She was, she told herself, making something out of nothing. Someday John would just be there, offering neither an explanation nor an apology. He would simply reappear, rock solid as ever - a handsome man in an impeccable custom-made suit carrying his inhuman load of dark, deadly secrets like a modern day Atlas.

Maybe there was an innocent, ordinary explanation for where he had gone - or one as innocent and ordinary as anything John could be involved in.

But deep inside, she knew better.

Zoe Morgan was a smart woman.

And a worried one.

x-x The End x-x


End file.
